Beyond FEPC

Thanks for sending me Commentary with the article by Felix Cohen, and other pieces which I have enjoyed. Cohen does us a service in trying to estimate the dollars-and-cents costs of race discrimination. Maybe the fog of Southern opposition to the remedial legislation might be cleared by adding further to his catalogue of losses. Of course, there are too many other differences between Connecticut and the Carolinas, say, besides race treatment, to permit of comparisons of those states merely in terms of effects of discrimination. I am content, as a Southerner, to deplore our treatment of Negroes as diminishing our social stature in every respect—many unguessed.

What will help, of course, is not a moral resolution, but full employment. Then the racial tensions are so much reduced. We must work on all hopeful fronts. The economic seems to me—and I am sure to Felix Cohen—to promise most.